And This One is Full of Rain

by Dana Blatte | Dec 3, 2020 | flash fiction

The birds only come once a year. Always on my birthday, just as I’m blowing my age into candle smoke and choking down a sliver of over-sweetened cake because my mom came home early from work to bake it and she gets mad when I don’t eat.

But the birds are back, which makes it harder to forget the numbers, the calories and the sixteen and the time. The time until my death. Or someone’s death — my grandmother’s never been good at predicting the future. I only half-learned it, she tells me whenever I’m forced to go
over there because my mom thinks high schoolers still need babysitters. But you see, this shape is foreboding, she says, tracing whorls into the tea dregs. And this one is full of rain.

//

The birds are hungry for the streetlights. They stumble down telephone wires like drunks, bellies distended with the air they have gorged in the name of pride.

Here, I offer from my crouch on the front stoop. I flick all the porchlights on, even the ones I’m not supposed to because they shine right through the neighbor’s windows. The birds appear at my feet with their beaks split wide enough to eat the shrunken suns whole. They butter themselves in the molten gold.

I wonder if there are birds in the afterlife. I hope there are because I like feeding them light. There’s no weightiness to it as if you swallowed a day and all the clocks came out backward. Time is funny like that. It ebbs between my fingers until I blink and go unmoored.

My grandmother says that’s how you find yourself: you just need to follow the things bigger than your own body.

//

I don’t ask my mom if I can go to a party tonight. It’s my birthday and I just want to get drunk like the birds: papered in gold and fairy-soft on my feet. So I scatter their feather-slick shadows as I back the car I’m not supposed to know how to drive out into the street. The birds swarm around me, pooling in the dusty yellow scythes of my headlights.

At a random classmate’s house, I pull in too far away from the curb. The birds finally subside when I turn off the key.

My neighbors would throw a fit if they lived next to this house, where red and blue and pink and orange spill from every crevice to wash the landscape in neon.

Hey, good-looking, a boy mouths, singsong through the windshield. He sways to a silent rhythm and I swear a bird swoops down to nip a warning at his exposed throat.

Go away, I hiss to both. But he’s too puffed with air to heed my warning.

The bird cuts down again, wings angled into blades.

The boy folds against the hood so smoothly I can pretend he’s still alive.

//

It starts to rain just as I step inside. No one else seems disturbed by the corpse on the lawn or the raindrops fattened on the grass, so I’m not either. I let myself be jostled by hips and elbows and bodies that make me regret ever eating the birthday cake my mom baked. The numbers haunt me again. Sugar and flour and frosting and skin that sloughs away under the
pulsating of the music.

What’s the best way to kill a bird? my grandmother used to joke when she noticed the way they trailed me by the ribbons of my feet. Wring ‘em by the neck.

//

The bedroom reeks of something half-digested and diluted by illegal substances. I cocoon myself under the covers anyway. The sheets are still warm enough for me to pretend this is my house. But I start to drift out of time again, blinking and blinking until a couple so intertwined I can’t distinguish one figure from the other stumbles through the door.

Oh, sorry, one of them says as she slides her fingers into someone’s crotch. Is this room occupied?

I shift back into the present and shake my head. Slowly, then quickly and aggressively. No, no, I was just leaving. Please, uh, don’t let me stop you from doing– I gesture at the bed and flee.

//

There’s a dead bird on the roof. Its mouth gulps toward the moon, but the angle is off. I nudge it a little closer and hope something sweet trickles in.

What a shitty birthday, right? I laugh, more to the wind than to myself. Then, I struggle to my feet. I haven’t really had anything to drink — other than a few sips stolen from a plastic cup I found abandoned on the stair banister — but I still droop from side to side. Best way to kill a bird, I murmur as my feet make friends with the shingled edge. In the dark, it’s easy to see how the ground stretches into infinity, how maybe if I fall there will never be an impact.

Shit, are you going to jump? a boy crows from behind me.

I fall backward. No! Of course not. Are you?

He shrugs. Sure, why not. And he spirals into the air so fast I think I’ve become unhooked by time again. His limbs splay across the ground and I can’t help but laugh at the stick-figured cartoon he’s become.

One by one, everyone else from the party files onto the roof. Laughless and solemn. Wait, I call, but they are already flying themselves off the edge.

The birds descend to pick their skins. Maybe they’re hungry for touch too, or maybe they just want something pretty for their nests.

You see, this shape is foreboding, I hear my grandmother saying, and I can see her tracing their outlines crime scene style on the lawn. Time starts to skitter away from me again as the sky’s teardrops eddy their blood into tea stains.

Lisa Won’t Quit Scuba

by John Jodzio | Nov 30, 2020 | flash fiction

You and Lisa tried to save your marriage by taking some community education classes. Intro to Pottery started in March, Beginning Scuba was slated for May. 

“Maybe learning new things will rekindle our love,” you told her.
 

“Maybe learning new things will prove our love is dead,” Lisa said.

You worked hard at your pottery, but everything you made looked like a melted candy bar. Lisa made a teapot so wonderful that the instructor offered to buy it for $300.

One morning, Lisa slid the divorce papers across the breakfast nook.

“Sorry,” she said, “watching you mold clay only made things worse
 

The divorce was quick and mostly amicable. Lisa got the cat that hated you and the station wagon that wouldn’t stop smelling like tacos. You got the lawn furniture with the spots of mold, the tote bag stuffed full of tote bags. 
       

“I won’t go to scuba if you quit pottery,” Lisa told you.
       

“Fine,” you told her. “It’s a deal.”
       

But then two weeks later you showed up at Scuba and there was Lisa standing by the pool in a blue wetsuit with her fingernails painted to match.
      

“This wasn’t the agreement,” you said. 
      

“It was a waste not to come,” she told you and you had to agree.
  
 For the first two weeks of Scuba, your instructor, this old hippie named Alexi, did not let anyone get in the water. All you did was talk about equipment. All you did was discuss everything that could go wrong when you dove — how you could surface too quickly, how the gauges that were supposed to save your life would sometimes lie to you.
       

“Scuba is more talking about diving than actual diving,” Alexi explained,

“Scuba is more about safety than it is about water.”
      

There was a younger guy in the class named James. He wasn’t sausaged into his wetsuit like everyone else. After class you saw Lisa talking to him in the parking lot, laughing a little too hard. You stopped by the bar that was on the way home to make sure the two of them weren’t there. You didn’t find them, but you found Alexi, only 30 minutes removed from teaching, already wasted.
     

“Hello, hello,” he said, patting the chair next to him, “come, come.”
      

Over the next hour you unloaded on Alexi, told him everything — about your divorce, about how pottery didn’t help, about how Scuba was making everything worse.
       

“Let me help you unfuck things,” Alexi told you as he patted your back. “Let good ol’ Alexi help make things right.”

At the next class, Alexi finally let the class get in the water. Lisa partnered with James and everyone partnered with their partner or friend. You were alone, partnered with Alexi.
       

“Everything that happens underwater needs to happen slower and with more purpose,” he explained to the class. “If you want something to happen underwater you have to want it way more than you want it on dry land.”
       

Everyone slid into the shallow end of the pool. You scuttled around, tried to stop your heart from exploding through your chest. All the equipment was so goddamn heavy. It made you want to stop moving, made you want to curl up on the bottom of the pool and close your eyes. As you were putting the equipment away that night, Alexi walked over to you.
         

“Thursday is our certification test,” he whispered to you. “Be ready to rekindle your love.”

On Thursday, Alexi was standing on the side of the pool giving instructions for the certification test when someone ran in from the parking lot and yelled that there was a car on fire.
       

You looked at Alexi and he winked at you. Luckily the fire in James’ car was only smoldering at that point, some crumpled newspapers that had failed to catch. James stomped out the fire and Lisa walked over and poked you in the chest.
       

“Did you do this?” she asked.
       

“No,” you said, “it wasn’t me,” but your words sounded whiny, unconvincing. Instead of going back to the pool, you got in your car and drove to the bar, started drinking. 
       

“How the fuck was lighting his car on fire going to help me get back together with Lisa?” you asked Alexi when he showed up.
      

“Setting a car on fire has always worked for me,” Alexi said.
       

Alexi tried to talk you into coming back to the pool the next day, said he would let you do your certification test one on one.
       

“Okay,” you told Alexi but then you never show up. You stay in bed, binge watching a fishing show. 
       

Sometimes you still see Alexi at the bar and he tells you to come back to the pool and finish your certification and you tell him you will, this time for sure. You order another drink and scroll through the most recent pictures Lisa has posted of her and James scuba diving in bright blue water, pictures of them tan and smiling, pictures of the two of them all over the goddamn world.

Into the Sink

by Courtney Clute | Nov 19, 2020 | flash fiction

She slipped her thumb into her mouth, sucked in a heavy swallow of air, shrunk her waist to the size of a noodle, and disappeared down the kitchen sink drain.

Slithering down the pipe, she shrugged the darkness on like a winter coat. There was a piece of dark meat rotisserie chicken from dinner last night stuck against the pipe. She scraped the chicken off and savored the wet piece sticking with black drain gunk and slush, enjoying the thought of repurposing waste for nourishment. She dreamed of being a food writer, so she always jotted down her experiences with food, pulling out a notepad, taking logs of accent flavors and sensations that she would then write up into her food journal later.

This wasn’t the first time she dove into her kitchen sink, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Mommy, mommy, I have red itchy dots on my armpit.” Into the sink she’d go.

“Honey, when’s your birthday, again?” Into the sink she’d go.

“Mrs. Peters, Jeremy just threw up at his desk.” Into the sink she’d go.

She’d go in when she was happy too, like she was now after reading Salt Fat Acid Heat for the third time. Oh, how she envied Samin Norsat, her fluent Italian speech, her galloping from country to country to discover the world’s flavors, childless, spouseless.

She stayed among the pipes for hours, laying down among the slush, piles of churned up chive potatoes, broccolini, spaghetti, overcooked ribeye her husband made that she spit up into the sink when he wasn’t looking. Eating dried, shriveled up beef is like gnawing on the hopes of yesterday, she’d written in her journal.           

As she rubbed the waste into her skin like a full body beauty mask and made snow angels, she heard the echoes of her husband calling out, looking for her, the whiny shrills of her children complaining for snacks, emails beeping into her inbox from overprotective parents. But she stayed in the waste.

The waste was silent. The waste was kind. The waste was patient. It listened to her when she told it stories of her life where she was the new Samin. Except she was a food writer, traveling to Morocco and Japan to try chicken tagine and udon and unagi, writing for international culinary magazines, winning awards for her words. Five-star restaurants would beg her to come review their food, and she’d show up with thick, dark sunglasses, a paisley scarf wrapped around her head so they didn’t know it was her.

The waste encouraged her fantasies. To leave her husband. The waste enjoyed when she scooped it into her mouth and described its texture and taste. A decadent smoothie of grime, ground bone, dish soap, and soggy strips of onions. The perfect ending to any day.  The waste felt loved. The waste loved her. She loved the waste.

Eventually, when the outside world went to sleep, when she could hear her husband snoring from their bedroom, she’d emerge from the drain, satisfied with her escape, planning her next food article, where this time she might just finally submit it to a food magazine. She could hear the whispers of the waste snaking up the drain, cheering her on.

Fable

by K-Ming Chang | Nov 16, 2020 | flash fiction

Michelle Dong lived with her father and fourteen cousins in a butter-soft house at the end of the block, the only family in the neighborhood not directly related to us. In another country, Uncle Dong used to be some kind of teacher, but now he sold parts of his car. For years we watched him strip his car part by part, the tires rolled away and the headlamps gouged out, until there was only a hood the color of a cockroach, and even that was gnawed gone by fog. His own yard, the only one in the neighborhood, was a chorus of beheaded poppies, which my brother said was used to make opium. He said that’s why Uncle Dong spent most of the week asleep, all his windows pasted with newspaper, his house balled up and hungover. Inside their garage, the Dongs raised finches, multiplying to six hundred. Every weekend the Dongs would open their garage door in an attempt to thin out their colony, releasing them by the hundreds, a stream of birds as thick as milk.

White birds are bad luck, and that’s why Michelle painted their badness away: she brought the white finches to the driveway in shoeboxes and pinned them to the pavement with her left hand, painting their feathers with her right. She painted them with an assortment of nail polishes, shades I couldn’t name except by making sounds that matched them: clap-yellow, whistle-silver, gut-punch gold.

 Michelle invited me over one time to play a killing game. We went to different high schools – hers was the Catholic school where girls wore skirts like sails, and mine was the public school where police dogs sniffed our asses – but I saw her every day, carrying buckets of water in and out of the garage through the side door. I believed the water was for the birds to drink, but later when I looked into one of the buckets in her side-yard, I saw that she was drowning them, all the bird-bodies clotting the water. They floated on the surface, their bones borrowing more air. My mother always told me that when she was little and raised chicks and pigeons and ducks, she had to fill their water bowls with stones because the baby birds would drown themselves by falling asleep mid-drink. I thought they were stupid to do so, but my mother said I used to fall asleep with her nipple in my mouth all the time when I was a baby. Be glad I dried up eventually, she said, or my milk would have drowned you, my beautiful little bird idiot.

When I went to Michelle’s garage, she told me to leave my net behind. Instead, she handed me her Chemistry Honors textbook, its cover stained with something dark-sweet and viscous. She held another textbook – Calculus – that was symmetrically stained. This is how I kill them, she said. We entered through the side-door and she turned on the lights, fluorescent glow that slid to the floor as slow as mucus. Birds sewed the air into a sky. Some of them were small as wasps, and their shadows speckled the concrete floor where bird-bodies decomposed, some that had already been pared to bone. Birdshit collaged the walls and floor, streaks like an oil painting, and I breathed only through my mouth. Like this, Michelle said, and arced her textbook through the air with both hands, swinging it like a baseball bat, slamming it against the wall. When she lifted the book, there were stains branding the cover and the wall, the finches broken like fruit. Now you go, she said, and I watched the necklace of sweat around her neck, the way it swung in the dark.

I swung the textbook, felt the finches flinch against it, slammed the book against the wall. Lifted it: a dead finch flattened into a comma-shaped shadow. Not bad, Michelle said and spat on the ground of the garage. It was the way men in our neighborhood spat on the sidewalk: the tongue flicking easy as a whip, the spit thick as bird-shit. Later, we sat outside on her driveway on two upside-down buckets and I tried to spit too, to exile the taste of blood in my mouth, but nothing came out of me but a sound, thinned-out.

Michelle wore her cousins’ wifebeaters and kicked gravel back onto the street with her toe. Her hair was ironed to the back of her neck with sweat. Later, I would practice spitting into the bathroom sink, mimicking her mouth so that its shape would become familiar to me; so that when I looked into the mirror, my mouth was hers. There was beauty to her brutality, the way she angled her chin like the sun was perched on it, but I saw that her hands were fluttering like birds. I cupped her hands in my own, the way I imagined you would rescue a bird that had tipped out of its nest, but Michelle jerked her hands back.

Here’s a story, she said, and sat on her hands so that I couldn’t see them. About my father. He had a pet pigeon he leashed to his wrist. Everyone tried to cut it off his wrist and eat it, but he wouldn’t let anyone come near it. One night it happened, the bird was snipped loose and stewed, and my father was so upset he almost slit his own throat, except he couldn’t find a blade because everyone in the village was holding theirs. I asked Michelle if that was why he bred so many birds, if he was trying to pay off some kind of debt, and she looked at me. Her shadow on the asphalt was fading like a bruise. She laughed and I leaned closer to her mouth, wanting to smell her breath, its bait.

Later that summer, my mother woke me early one Sunday morning and told me to come look, come look. It was hailing birds. I looked out at the street and saw: finches freckling the street, their feathers like snow, non-native to this weather. There were so many dead I lost count. Some kind of disease, my mother said, it must be. I watched Michelle from my window, raking up the birds while her cousins got into their cars and drove over the bird-corpses, splaying them open, grinding their bones to light.

Spaghetti Junction

by Elisabeth Ingram Wallace | Nov 12, 2020 | flash fiction

I had been snow-drifting through December, on slow trains and delayed buses, ending each day with a long icy walk past other bodies, also losing grip.

I could not get home that night, none of us could; Spaghetti Junction had filled with snow. We decided to camp at the office.

The heavy snow was unexpected. It had been mild that morning. Warm enough for icicles to ding from the roofs, impale children through their tiny soft skulls, kebabs of blood and hot chocolate. I hoped for such things then. I still do. To fill up the corners of my grey days with blood, circle them red.

I’d started Temping the August of my eighteenth birthday. I gifted myself the stationery cupboard, a bag full of paperclips and Post-It Notes. Theft, plus small chugs of Vodka made the hours chain together into long silver lines, of days and weeks, months I could pin-number from a wall.

Outside, that December day, the roads had vanished, the shops shuttered, my broken brain in a broken world, stranged by snow. Marshmallow cars, bollards of mountain lion and goat, skeletons of ice, snow folding its paws over doors, bunting roofs white.

We walked.

All the trains had stopped, all the buses gone.

All the wild was fleeing, Alaskan Geese crumping through the sky.

Flurries of snowmen, carrot noses pointing out the night. The fog of it, people melting, dropping into mist.

Tempting, to lay down next to a snow lion, sleep inside a zebra crossing, to freeze into spaghetti junction, go invisible in the snow. Be dug up in the future, bone-by-bone like a woolly-mammoth.

Instead, we went to find a pub. There’s always a pub.

The ‘Pig and Whistle’ was open.  I ordered a pint.

Another.

Another.

We ate crisps, then we ordered burgers, chicken, steaks, fries, like we could digest the cold out of ourselves.

That was when Dan in Accounting arrived, late, brushing snow out his spikey hair.

“Jesus, it’s like a pack of ravenous wolves in here,” he smiled.

We stopped eating, talking, stared at him. 

“I could hear you lot a mile off. You ladies. You’re so,” he paused and looked at Kayla’s plate, “hearty.”

Kayla had ordered a steak, and had been putting triangles of bloody meat in her mouth seconds earlier, corporate red lipstick wearing back to skin.

Kayla clanked her knife and fork down on the plate, smushed her napkin to a snowball on top.

 “Fuck off Dan,” I said.

“Whoa. Whatever happened to being ladylike,” Dan said. He grinned.

The other guys sat on the edge of his conversation, some lighting up, some rolling eyes.

‘Chill out, it’s just banter,’ he said to me.

“Women always get called animals though, don’t they? Pigs, bitches,” I said.

“It’s nothing personal,’ Dan replied, ‘We just don’t want you getting too husky.”

I ate more Salt and Vinegar crisps and willed Dan to die.

I listened to the wild dogs outside, skidding over ice.

Kayla drank white wine till she laughed, a strange laugh with vines all over it, I laughed too, let myself go, to the howl in the wind, the footsteps in snow, spin speckles, flicks of flight.

If you listen well to the snow, you can hear the animals pirouette, the swish and whine of a canine triple Salchow.

The feral hounds circled the bins, breaking glass, looking for scraps to flesh their bones, ready for a fight.

It was dark on the walk back to the office, brick alleys snuffly with mutts snoring in doorways, puppies shivering in the curve of every snow angel. A bite in the squall; the whistle of a pig, a lion; a pack of bollard goats.

The world was getting deep, nippy, twisty about the ankles.

I cut through a crocodile of school children.

There were glaciers forming outside the municipal library.

Drunk, back in the office, everyone set up camps behind their desks – tent-forts, coats over chairs. They iglooed into snores.

While everyone slept, I stole stationary.

It helped. To have an infinite supply of white, empty notebooks, cheap biros to gouge a blue crack in the ice.

By dawn, the snow was melting, I’d written my application to University, an essay about the gender of sound, woman as animal, hungry, raw.

The thaw slushed everyone back into shushed phone-calls and blind busy nothing.

I went back to work too, as an Alaskan Malamute. A Siberian hound, husky. A strong storm-weather dog, with muscle, speed, endurance and claws. My paws would itch at night, soft pads splitting white into bone. My new goal was to pull in heavier loads.

Soon, I had three-hundred and twenty-two Bic-biros, sixty-one notebooks, seven mouse-mats, sixty-two highlighters and a large aloe-vera plant from the staff kitchen. 

Twenty-two years on, as I look at the Oxford College library before of me, I see through the glass. It’s snowing. December, again.

I’m there too, in the window. Reflected. Decembering, remembering. I groom my wolf hairs, curl the whitening forward.

I push open the window, taste the sky, the Spaghetti Junction of it. Iced whorls of motorway, frosted white noise; the years I was trapped inside, how I stole my way out.

I look at the twelve girls sitting their entrance-exams today, seventeen-years old. I wonder who among them writes about Echo, or the howling dog-voiced Furies, deadly Sirens, babbling Kassandra, Iambe with her skirt around her neck, exposing open lips. Who will stop at this junction? Who will race, steal space, wear a blizzard for a face?

‘You have five minutes remaining,’ I say.

They grip their pens, and snarl.

One minute

Two

Three

Four

 ‘Put down your pens,’ I say, and none of them do, all of them keep writing, all of them have a sentence to finish, words running up mountains, clawed nibs digging down, all growl, somewhere in the wolf-thickets, scratching white nothing into howl.

SOUTHWEST LOOP 820

by Cyn Nooney | Nov 9, 2020 | flash fiction

That summer in Dallas my roommate Tina stole a Penthouse from her father’s stash. We wanted to see why Miss America surrendered her crown. Tina scoffed at the black and white photographs. Disgusting, she said. What sluts. I thought their bodies were tender and beautiful. Later, when Tina went to sleep, I turned the TV on low. Three women were dead in a bar on Southwest Loop 820. The newscaster said the rampage began after patrons declined to dance with a man who later returned with a gun. The Penthouse lay open on our floor. I could feel Vanessa Williams’ shame burn through the pages and into my skin.

In the morning Tina yelled about the cockroaches coming up from the drain. I was in my room, squirming into pantyhose, an empty L’eggs container cracked open on the bed. I can’t handle this, Tina carried on. Come kill them. Do it yourself, I yelled back. Quit being a baby.

We’d lived together in college, had finally landed jobs downtown. She had a K-car. I took the bus. Bananarama was playing on the radio: It’s a cruel, (cruel), cruel summer. We were both late for work. Rent overdue.

 The front page of the newspaper showed some of the carnage from the shooting. The inside of Penthouse showed some of the vaginas. Other than my own I’d never seen one up close.

 When I exited the bus, I could smell the exhaust on my blouse. The heels on my white pumps were scuffed. I rode the elevator to the nineteenth floor, where Oliver was in charge. He wore wrinkled suits with crimson ties, and when he passed the cubicles, he glanced upward. He was the only one with a private office. Had a bathroom too, and a middle-aged assistant named Jane who collected his dry cleaning and replenished the toilet paper. The rest of us assembled entertainment guides. My job was proofreading and I believed I was good at spotting errors.

Around ten-thirty I went out for a smoke and a fun-size Kit Kat. Two banker types were standing by the door. It was ninety-seven degrees, the sidewalk griddle-hot and just as greasy. I saw the taller guy bum a cigarette from the shorter one. Heard him say, Guess them Bettys should’ve danced.

Turning away, I tossed the Kit Kat, still in its wrapper, thinking about men and Vanessa and whether anybody would consider me pretty enough to pose in the nude. I’d wanted to bring Penthouse to work so I could look at it in the bathroom during lunch but Tina had seen me try to slide it in my briefcase.

What are you—a lesbo? she’d said.

I wasn’t sure. I had no one to ask. The only time I kissed a girl was back in fifth grade. I didn’t answer. Just stared at Tina and then at the floor.

Anyway, she said, give it here.

It’s wrong what they’re doing to her, I said. Making her give up the crown.

Tina crossed her arms and shook her head. She deserves it, for doing those things. Why are you so weird? Then she snatched the magazine. It’s going in the trash, she said, and so is this. She picked up the newspaper, muttering, So awful, so gross. All of it. You can thank me later.

She left the apartment and I pictured Vanessa and the women from Loop 820 lying in a heap.

Back at my cubicle, I dabbed my pits with Kleenex then sniffed to see how bad. Like a raccoon up the chimney. Oliver was approaching so I straightened up and said, Good morning. Sir.

There were only ten of us crammed in the small workspace but I knew he didn’t know my name. He didn’t acknowledge or return my greeting. I watched him walk toward his doorway and I heard him tell Jane to hold his calls. He needed a nap. He closed the door.

Oliver left shortly after five, followed quickly by Jane and the rest of the staff. I’d never been in his office but was suddenly seized with a strange urgency to do so—growing up I’d been forbidden to enter my father’s home study for reasons that had never been explained. I paused at the threshold then crossed Oliver’s room slowly, holding my breath. There was a large maple desk with a tobacco pipe on top and a burgundy leather chair with rolling wheels. I walked toward the window and looked down at the miniature people crossing the baked asphalt, rushing to bus stops and newsstands and markets. Take some dictation, I said aloud and laughed, turning dramatically from the window, addressing an imaginary assistant. I’ve got a lot to say. Let’s start with the Miss America Organization. After that, we’ll tackle Penthouse.

I laughed again, sadly. Always so much braver in my mind.

I picked up Oliver’s pipe and knocked it upside down on the desk. Took the gum from my mouth and stuck it on the edge of his chair. Rifled through a stack of manila files and mixed up some of the pages and took a few to hide in the bathroom and that’s when I saw her in the rack: Vanessa Williams—between sports columns and spreadsheets.

I’m taking you home, I said, and pressed her to my chest. Seconds later, I collided with Jane.

Oh! she shrieked—What are you doing here?

I dropped the magazine. The pages splayed open on the floor, revealing Vanessa yet again.

Well? said Jane.

What are you doing here? I said.

Never mind that. I could have you fired, you know.

I nodded. Inched my way toward the door.

Jane picked up the magazine and turned it over. I kept scooting away.

Wait, she said after a moment, extending her arm—I believe this is yours.

You Will Do This

by Steven Simoncic | Nov 2, 2020 | flash fiction

She will look tired. He will look bored. They will sit on the edge of their bed, close enough to indicate they are still married, far enough apart to indicate how it is going. They will have called you to their bedroom, which will be immediately weird. Your parents never do that, and you will assume you are fucked – in the kind of trouble you will not be able to talk your way out of, or tantrum your way through. Walking down the hallway, you’ll try to remember where you hid your Juul, wondering if they found the tiny vibrator Linea stole from her total bitch stepmom and gave to you — the one you’ve been too freaked out by to try, and put in your panty drawer, which is both stupid and obvious. You will be convinced they have found it, and that when you walk in, they will present it to you like a dirty, slutty, buzzing Christmas gift.

As you walk into their bedroom, you decide you will not speak first. You will have learned this from previous family meetings that started with you speaking and ended with you picking at dead skin on your thumb while they spoke.  

“Reggie hit a nurse today,” your mom will say.

This will be a relief. No vaping, no vibrators, no you. This will also not be a surprise. Reggie spent thirty years at the Rough Steel Assembly plant working with guys who just got out of the military or jail. She swears more than other grandmas do, and smokes more than other grandmas do, and is more than capable of hitting someone, including your mom when she was your age.

But Reggie is also fun to watch Wheel of Fortune with. She’s raw-funny, brutally honest, and doesn’t get into your shit. And up until she went into the hospital, she was around, and oddly, became your best friend since you ate a bottle of Doxepin last Fall and people stopped sitting with you at lunch, because nobody likes a clinically depressed black girl.

“She’s hitting the nurses now… so…” Your mom will shake her head and wave her hand as she fills the silence with nervous energy. “A prognosis of terminal blah, that won’t get better even if the new drug blahs… Reggie wants to come home, but there’s no way she can blah for herself, and she can’t come here, because we can’t take care of someone who blahs in her own blah…” And then, finally, “Maggie, she needs to be in a home. She’ll listen to you.”

And in this moment, you will know.

You will know that Reggie is dying, and that your parents have already decided where she will die. You will know that there’s nothing you can do about it, just like last Fall, when they put you in a home, and there was nothing you could do about it. And you will know that even though you are being used; for one small moment, their fear makes you powerful. You will be fifteen years-old, overweight from antidepressants, slightly high in your parent’s bedroom – and for once — you will be in control. Not of the outcome, but of the process, and after the fourteen months of state-appointed therapy, you will understand that process matters. So you decide you will do this.

The hospital will smell like rubbing alcohol and gravy. You will stop at the lobby gift shop to buy one of the impossibly chipper mylar balloons that say things like You Did It! and Oh Yeah! When you get to the room, you’ll hear the sound of someone buying a vowel on the TV above Reggie’s bed. She will look small. Generic. No lipstick. Rare. Hair undone. Never. You walk to the side of the bed and tie the balloon to her wrist, the same way she used to do for you when you went to the zoo.

“You did it,” you will say, reading the balloon.

“What’d I do?”

“You hit a nurse.”

Not quite a laugh. But a smile. A tired little curl on the side of her mouth. The wheel spins. People cheer.

“How’s Linea’s –

“Haven’t tried it yet.”

 She nods.

Her stomach is rock hard, distended from liver failure. She lays with her arms across her abdomen like a child with a tummy ache. She motions for you to come closer with a hand that is bloodied and bruised from weeks of IV’s. You lay alongside her on the hospital bed, your head nestled into her shoulder, the same way she laid with you when she called 911 and waited for the EMT’s to arrive. The wheel spins. People cheer.

“Reggie – I think, maybe –”

You feel her fragile arm squeeze against your body, and you stop. The things you had prepared to say, will go unsaid. You will not tell her it will be okay. And you will not tell her that she might even like it in the home. Because it probably won’t, and she probably won’t, and you respect her too much to pretend otherwise.

“I know why you’re here, Maggie,” she says in a low gravel. “And I’m still glad you came.” This time her eyes smile. She dozes off for a minute, and then, “I’ll go. Just don’t tell your parents I was so nice about it.” One last squeeze, and then she relaxes. You will feel the tension she has kept in her body for seventy-six years recede into resignation, if not peace. Your state-appointed therapist would say she has reached acceptance of her outcome.

Neither of you will move as the lunch tray is delivered. Laying together. In silence. Side by side.

Above her bed, the puzzle is solved. People cheer. The contestant hugs his ecstatic wife and perfect children. Behind them, in big block letters, on cubes of bright white light, are the words Here We Are.

“I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself, Maggie,” she whispers.

“Me too Reggie.”

The Future History of the Arctic

by Alexander Lumans | Oct 30, 2020 | flash fiction

100. Someone has broken into the Global Seed Vault. 

99. If you kill an ice bear, you have to tell the Governor. 

98. If you do not, you will be subject to loopholes. 

97. The Governor has an expensive Spanish carmine speedboat he takes for unlawful cruises in  the fjord next to town. 

96. If you see an ice bear, you do not have to tell the Governor, but you must offer an ice bear something. 

95. A sack of kittens. 

94. If you do not, he will kill you. 

93. In The Future History of the Arctic, the writer predicts one hundred bad things will happen  before the good thing. 

92. It is a lot like William T. Vollmann’s The Rifles. 

91. Except for the yellow king parts. 

90. “Life is a process of trading many hopes for one memory.” 

89. Today the sun’s out, blazing like a white eyehole in the cloud-masked sky. 88. Someone stole dandelion seeds from the Vault. 

87. When the sun never sets, life feels like a very long road. 

86. Nothing is too far from nothing. 

85. If an ice bear sees you, it will wait until you see it. 

84. The Future History of the Arctic is a book in the museum. 

83. The museum is closed.

 82. Sack of kittens arrive as special imports. 

81. Why not shoot an ice bear when you see him on the long road called life? 80. Guns have been outlawed for seventy years.  

79. The museum has some guns. 

78. The Governor has one gun—a rifle—he is the Governor. 

77. A largely contested loophole in the legal system. 

76. The Future History of the Arctic will be written by me. 

75. It addresses the gun law loophole. 

74. If you kill an ice bear, and you are the Governor, you still have to tell the Governor. 73. Another loophole. 

72. Someone stole plain bean seeds from the Vault. 

71. There was once a yellow king, but he died. 

70. The Future History of the Arctic says others will come. 

69. “In this mirrorless house of mirrors.” 

68. Someone’s building a fantastic garden. 

67. Then: Cake Time! 

66. The Future History of the Arctic says the difference between the Governor and me is what  one is willing to do with a gun. 

65. No loophole for this. 

64. Someone stole pineapple seeds from the Vault. 

63. If an ice bear sees your boottracks but not you, it must offer you something. 62. A sack, kittenless. 

61. This vexes.

 60. Ice bears search for loopholes. 

59. Ice? 

58. Some more ice? 

57. A key to the museum? 

56. This is a lie—no key exists. 

55. Someone stole lychee seeds from the Vault. 

54. “Sack of kittens for sale!” can be heard through the sun-blind town. 

53. If the sun never sets, there is no such as a thing as a sunrise. 

52. If you or I kill the Governor, you or I become the Governor. 

51. If an ice bear kills the Governor, I could make a case that an ice bear becomes the Governor. 50. This is the case. 

49. The museum opens for an hour, but no one realizes it. 

48. The ice bear Governor outlaws all special imports. 

47. The ice bear Governor outlaws all speedboats except his own. 

46. The ice bear Governor keeps the gun law. 

45. Someone stole elephant seeds from the Vault. 

44. Public outcry: “We need more loopholes in the legal system!” 

43. In The Future History of the Arctic, an ice bear becomes ice bear Governor. 42. You could look into The Future History of the Arctic and see what to do next about: 41. The ice bear Governor. 

40. The sack of kittens market bottoming out. 

39. The Vault break-in. 

38. “A hundred kilometers away the yellow king’s grave cracks open like a seed pod.”

 37. You cannot sell a sack of kittens for half a sack of kittens. 

36. It’s so bright out. 

35. The ice bear Governor takes lawful cruises in the expensive Spanish carmine speedboat. 34. He patrols for special imports. 

33. Difficult to see the future. 

32. No more sack of kittens imports. 

31. Sack of kittens prices hit the moon. 

30. “(How fine it is to have thoughts as empty as ice!)” 

29. “(The yellow king’s thoughts are ice.)” 

28. If you do not have a sack of kittens to give an ice bear, you must take an ice bear to the  museum. 

27. The museum is closed. 

26. An ice bear will—sometimes—adopt a kitten. 

25. A biological loophole. 

24. With the Governor’s rifle, the ice bear Governor shoots the ice bear crossing sign. 23. We have the world’s only ice bear crossing sign. 

22. Full of holes now. 

21. Someone stole Japanese cherry blossom seeds from the Vault. 

20. Someone is going to have to pay for all this. 

19. “When his life is not completed, a man cannot die.” 

18. In The Future History of the Arctic, we know what to do. 

17. Un-outlaw imports. 

16. Or pricecap sack of kittens.

15. Or more loopholes. 

14. The ice bear Governor is banging on the museum’s doors. 

13. Pay no attention to the bright sun; it blinds ninety-nine out of one hundred people. 12. Someone stole half-known seeds from the Vault. 

11. The ice bear Governor wants to know what he’s going to do next. 

10. I leave boottracks all over town. 

9. I draw loopholes with my boottracks. 

8. Sacks of kittens mewl throughout the endless daylit night. 

7. The ice bear Governor sees my boottracks. 

6. He cannot afford a sack, kittenless. 

5. He offers me the rifle. 

4. I shoot the ice bear Governor. 

3. Now I’m the Governor. 

2. I return all the stolen seeds—except pineapple—to the Vault. 

1. I wait outside the museum with all the icy thoughts of a dead yellow king.